Educators, government administrators, and policy makers have recognized the great value of computers in education, and computers are becoming ever more present in the classroom. To date, the approach in producing educational materials for computers has been highly inefficient and expensive. Instructional designers and software engineers have been charged with the task of designing and implementing instructional materials from the ground up.
Some efforts have been made to use authoring software to produce instructional materials, such as the software sold under the trademarks AUTHORWARE and DIRECTOR by Macromedia, Inc. (San Francisco, Calif.). Similar software has been sold by Asymetrix Corp. (Seattle, Wash.) under the trademark MULTIMEDIA TOOLBOOK. Although such software has improved the process somewhat, it has not eliminated the need for software engineers. The authoring software available to date has in essence been a computer language which has required special expertise to use. Accordingly, the production of computer usable instructional materials with such software has involved investments of large sums of money for even relatively small projects.
What has been missing in the art is an efficient and inexpensive procedure for converting educational materials to on-line computer usable form. A common feature of most educational materials, whether they be used for instruction or testing, is the presentation of questions and the recording of responses in a paper and pencil form. Examples of this educational approach begin in elementary school and continue to the highest levels of education. Literally millions of pages of workbooks and tests exist having this form, and more are being created every day. The current approaches to creating computer usable educational materials have no practical way of accessing this base of existing materials. The present invention is directed to solving this important problem in the art.